T-shirt Quilt

I was pretty sick for a few weeks and completely lost my ‘sewjo’. I had a T-shirt quilt to finish for a friend and the deadline was quickly approaching. Luckily, I got it together and finished it up within 3-4 days. I think I spent so much time agonizing about how to make this quilt, I just didn’t want to do it. I had never made a T-shirt quilt before and the thought of messing up someone’s memories really concerned me!

Originally, I wanted to create a cool quilt where each shirt seemed to pop up in a 3D sort of way. Once I started cutting up the shirts, I realized this was not going to work. That began another couple weeks of agonizing because I was completely lost on how to put the shirts together. I read and looked at a zillion blogs and pictures of other quilts, but I still could not commit! Finally as the deadline was only 10 days away, I made myself get to work. In the end, I fit the shirts together almost like a puzzle, figuring out which pieces fit best and where.

I had several “helpers” during this process:

Once the top was put together, I spent another day or two deciding how to quilt it. I finally decided on a simple grid, which I think worked out pretty well. To start, I ran a piece of washi tape diagonally across the center of the quilt and then made diagonal lines out from there. I repeated the process for the other diagonal direction, so the quilt design ends up with diamonds. Here is a picture of how I started the process:

I just quilted following the line of the tape. The nice thing about washi tape was that I could reuse it several times to create more grid lines. The process was very quick and I was able to finish quilting in about 2-3 hours (including time to stop and remove/replace tape grid lines).

For the back, I purchased a $5 flat sheet at Walmart to keep it simple (and not too expensive!).

I cut the remains of Tshirts into 2.5″ strips, connected them and created a scrappy binding for the quilt. I interfaced the strips just like the T-shirts using Pellon SF101. I thought it was going to be too thick to sew through, but my Juki made easy work of it. I do not have the patience for hand sewing binding!!

I will be delivering the quilt to its new owner next week and I hope she likes it. It was stressful but hopefully the next one will be easier for me! The good news is my sewjo has also returned so I am excited to get to work on other projects. Any advice out there on conquering T-shirt quilts?

Post navigation

4 thoughts on “T-shirt Quilt”

Judy Bsays:

I have no advice on t-shirt quilts, but read your post with great interest. I have 2 boxes of t-shirts that must be cut up and made into at least 1 t-shirt quilt hopefully two. Thanks for the info on which interfacing to use. I can at least get started by cutting and interfacing. I like that yours are all not exactly 12 1/2″ square, which is what some have advised me. Thanks too for the pictures.

Hi. Thanks for reading! These shirts were so varied in their sizes of logo that a uniform 12.5″ square would just not work out. I just began cutting the logos out with plenty of blank space all around to account for seam allowance and any trimming needed. Once I started fitting them together into a puzzle, I found I needed to trim here and there to make them fit perfectly. Good luck with your quilts!!

Your T-shirt quilt looks perfect. You did a wonderful job of putting your puzzle together for having never done a T-shirt quilt before. I’ve done several over the years, and after they are done, you almost want to go another one because they turn out so good. I used another interfacing, but will look for the one you used to see how it compares to the one we had in the shop where I worked. That’s been 6 years ago, so there may be new stuff out now. Thanks for explaining how you quilted it. That was a new technique for me.

Such a challenging pattern for your first T-quilt, but you did such a nice job on it!! I have averaged about 1 T-shirt quilt per year for the past 15 years. I still haven’t lost that sense of dread over ruining someone’s memories! I just keep at it and hope for the best each time.

Every T-quilt is designed a bit differently than the others. In all this time, I have never used shirt strips for the binding. (I keep meaning to give it a try!) One of my favorite things to do is use them for the sashing. You should try is sometime!